What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

Can we build it up?

With Halloween only a week away, there’s a race to close out Q4 strong. While the pressure to meet year-end goals can be intense, it’s also a time to reflect on the progress made throughout the year and rally the team for a final push. Keeping a positive and motivated mindset is essential to tackle the challenges that come with closing out the year.

Give this song by Rival Sons a listen and see what the experts are saying this week.

The Power of Video & Animation

Last week we talked about the power of the human voice in the buyer’s journey – what about video? Simply put, being able to tell and show at the same time helps your audience understand better and stick around to hear more of your message. Seems like the perfect balance between that human voice and digital touch, right?

Our friends at Flikli explain that we absorb 80% of the information we see in visuals (as opposed to only 20% from reading). When you couple this innate preference for visuals with the dynamic, colourful nature of animated videos, it’s no surprise that they attract and hold attention more effectively than textual content: human beings are predominantly visual creatures.

So what other characteristics does video have that increase engagement?

• Simplicity: processing ease and enjoyment
• Emotion: creating connection and driving action
• Narrative: storytelling for memory enhancement
• Novelty: tapping into curiosity

Next time you’re looking for a compelling and interesting tactic for your marketing, maybe it’s time to try video or animation. It’s unique, spans both the human and digital channels and hopefully works for your money and earns its keep!

The Power of (Cloned) Voice???

There’s a new bootleg war – and it involves human voices!

The Recording Industry Association of America recently released its annual Notorious Markets List, which it submits to the US Trade Representative in hopes that the American government will do something about it. It names countries that are either ignoring the theft of music or not doing enough to combat it.

This year, the list cites a new problem: voice clones.

The year 2023 saw an eruption of unauthorized AI vocal clone services that infringe not only the rights of the artists whose voices are being cloned but also the rights of those that own the sound recordings in each underlying musical track. This has led to an explosion of unauthorized derivative works of our members’ sound recordings which harm sound recording artists and copyright owners.

Only one site is mentioned by name: a cloning service designed by a 20-year-old computer science student in the UK. Voicify.ai features vocal models of artists like Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Elvis Presley, Bruno Mars, Eminem, Harry Styles, Adele, Ed Sheeran and many others – and even goes beyond the music industry to include the likes of Obama, Trump, and Biden! Within seconds, anyone can have any one of these people say or sing anything you’d like.

Is this illegal? It’s unclear. The law has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to artificial intelligence.

What do you think? With pressure and time, some countries will likely introduce legislation around this… but maybe not everywhere. How might that affect the B2B landscape?

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello. Or even better, have one of the above artists or celebrities say hello on your behalf!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Voice and Video – Better Together appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

A client reached out this week and asked if I could help them out. They had a proposal in front of them from December of 2020, and wanted to know if we could get started asap! Can you relate? Well… sometimes we let things lapse, and then we’re suddenly in a panic to get those lead numbers THIS QUARTER!

Give this song by Silversun Pickups a listen before YOU hit that panic switch!

Top Enterprise Sales Tools for 2022

You may have heard about the latest round of financing 6sense closed last month. The sales and marketing tech space is hot… and this latest round increases 6sense’s valuation to $5.2 Billion! Their AI-driven ‘account engagement’ platform promises to unify data, people, and processes to unlock predictable revenue potential. This got me thinking about other sales and marketing tech in a crowded room.

How do you prioritize those solutions to add the most benefit to your initiatives? Our friends at Vidyard put together their list of top enterprise sales tools to adopt in 2022. How many of these have you integrated into your tech stack?

More NFT Nonsense – It’s Never Worth My Time

Like many musicians, Ozzy Osbourne has jumped on the NFT bandwagon, even though most of us still don’t really understand what they are, or the technical babble – and often white noise – that is used to describe them.

Ozzy’s CryptoBatz collection – comprised of 9,666 non-fungible tokens – is a new creation in the digital art world, and pays tribute to his infamous live bat-biting incident in 1982, which you can now own a small slice of in the form of a totally cool virtual bat.

In a highly-amusing video, wife and manager Sharon explains Ozzy’s NFT journey, while he freaks out behind the scenes in his home library over the creative process of making said NFT.

Wow.

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello. And no bats, please!!!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Don’t Panic! MarTech Heating Up appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

Do you have a favourite song? Maybe not one, but songs that reflect your mood and help you cope with those day-to-day stresses? I have many, and this song has been in heavy rotation lately – give it a listen with me as you read on, and know that you’re not alone (and hopefully not an easy target!).

Here’s what the experts are saying, and some takeaways from the past week:

What’s Working in Demand Gen

I think we can all agree that 2020 presented a lot of challenges to B2B marketers. Companies pivoted, switched operational models, and the dynamics of demand generation followed suit. I started this newsletter to address these challenges and share what successful organizations were doing to thrive.

So what B2B demand gen methods worked?

In Demand Gen Report’s State of Demand Generation Benchmark Survey, it was revealed that only 19% of those surveyed said they were increasing budget prioritization on event marketing – a sharp decrease from last year’s 41%. Instead, the report revealed that budgets are being shifted toward ABM (61%), content marketing (60%), sales enablement (48%), and personalization (43%), with the goal of unifying all stages of the sales funnel.

Does this align with your organization’s priorities?

Salesforce’s New ABM Features

I remember watching Marc Benioff first announce ‘Einstein’ at Dreamforce. It made quite the splash, and the industry was buzzing with the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in B2B sales and marketing. It’s been years since then, and despite some effort and a lot of hype, the AI market is nowhere close to reaching its full potential yet.

Salesforce just added two account-based marketing innovations to its Digital 360 platform: Einstein Key Account Identification and Accounts as Campaign Members. The new capabilities will enable companies to easily identify accounts with the strongest buying signals, allowing marketers to kick-start their ABM campaigns and drive more qualified pipeline growth.

Are you leveraging AI in your marketing efforts? According to Drift, 65% of marketing teams are still in the research stage of implementing AI, while only 17% are scaling it. In those companies that have implemented AI – what are your customers saying about the experience? Our informal polls indicate the experience still leaves much to be desired.

(Speaking of ABM, feel free to register for our ABM webinar with Forrester… details below!)

Middle-Class Musicians – No Easy Targets

With the decline of live entertainment, most working musicians would definitely agree that engaging with their audience is NOT an easy target anymore! This interesting article highlights challenges facing the ‘middle-class’ of musicians, how precarious their existence was before COVID hit, and how they’re battling to survive without live performances.

Yet – bands can still engage directly and efficiently with fans. Social media and apps like TikTok may be getting all the headlines, but an artist’s own website remains the most effective and reliable hub of direct-to-fan engagement.

According to Bandzoogle, members successfully engaged fans to generate revenue in 2020 by using their websites as the hub of their activity:

• Music fans still visit artist websites
• Fans still download music
• Bands sell significant merch on their sites
• Live stream shows (for a fee) are a strong revenue stream
• Fans will subscribe directly to artists

How does this impact B2B? As the lyric goes, Did you ever listen? Engagement is key! Get out and talk to your customers and turn them into fans, and they will engage directly and consistently.

Forrester Webinar – ABM Engagement – April 8

Join me and Alisa Groocock from Forrester for another webinar – “Are You Ready for B2B Account-Based Marketing?” Follow our techniques and create ABM Success in 2021 – sign up and we’ll send you the Forrester research report too!

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post The Demand Gen Moving Target appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

We’re all busy. But how busy are we… really? Are we moving things forward on a daily basis, or just going through the motions? With almost a year of various levels of lockdown behind us, perhaps we need a little novocaine for the soul to get us through and keep moving forward!

Give this song a listen with me as we discuss takeaways from the past week:

Increasing Data Quality

It feels like I’ve been talking to clients about data A LOT lately – intent data, data quality, data sourcing. The discussion always ends up coming back to that old computing adage, ‘garbage in, garbage out’ – and it’s as applicable now as it has ever been! So I spent some time looking at my favourite sources for research around data to discuss this week.

B2B data decays rapidly. I’ve pulled some stats from various sources – based on these, it’s no wonder companies struggle to keep their data clean!

• 40% of email addresses change at least once every two years
• 18% of telephone numbers change every year
• 21% of CEOs change every year
• 25-33% of email addresses become outdated every year

And I’m sure these numbers have increased due to COVID! According to ZoomInfo, there are some things you can do to address bad data:

1. Audit your database
2. Improve your data collection methods
3. Automate data maintenance

The HubSpot data, as well as reports such as this one from Dun & Bradstreet, show that marketers have increased investment in the quality of their data and are placing much more emphasis on data quality to improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

How are you improving data quality? Is it top of mind for your organization, or is your data quality costing you more than you realize?

Recorded Music Did Well Last Year

COVID didn’t keep the recorded music industry down last year, as revenue was up 9% to around $12 billion. That’s the 5th straight year of growth for the industry! According to the latest year-end report by the RIAA for 2020, streaming accounted for 83% of the total or a little more than $10 billion.

Paid subscriptions to on-demand streaming services are at the heart of the streaming revenue increase, and these subs grew by 14.6% up to $7 billion. Many wonder whether streaming subscriptions have hit the saturation point, but that’s not indicated in the numbers.

How does this impact B2B? Streaming services have a lot in common with B2B SaaS solutions. I think we can learn a lot by watching B2C tech and the trends in their marketing strategies and performance. Are there lessons learned that you can apply to your B2B solution? Perhaps it’s a tweak to your pricing model or a change in your market positioning.

No matter what, based on these results, it seems that there is no chance of them ‘sputtering out’ anytime soon!

Are You Ready for ABM?

Free Forrester Report Our friends at Forrester are joining us for another webinar – “Are You Ready for B2B Account-Based Marketing?” Learn how to create your own ABM Success in 2021 – sign up and we’ll send you their research report too!

As always, if I can help you out, let me know! Don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Overcoming Bad Data appeared first on Virtual Causeway.